Getting started with iOS 7: The best tools and tips explained on video

Apple’s latest mobile OS has been released alongside their new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, with some significant differences this time around. We took a trip through a lot of these new features and offered some tips for getting most out of the OS.

Very little of what changed in iOS 7 was solely visual. Every tool in the OS, from the lockscreen to the camera app, has seen an update in both design and usability. To walk you through some of the bigger changes, we’ve put together a series of quick videos that will help sort out the best ways to use these new features. We’ll start out with the new notification center, which offers you a great glance at your day as well as your current notifications from apps on your phone or tablet.

Swiping down from the top is no longer the only way to access information quickly on the iPhone. Control Center is all new for iOS, and allows you to swipe up from anywhere in the OS and access basic settings like volume, Bluetooth, screen brightness, and even the LED on the back of the phone for when you need a flashlight. If you’re playing music, the album art and track will show up here alongside controls for the music app. This system is on by default anywhere on your OS, including the lockscreen.

If you’re not a fan of having those setting available to anyone who picks up your phone, you can access controls for where this feature is allowed to work in the Settings page.

Using folders in iOS 7 is a little different now, as well. The previous animation, where the screen split and the icons in the folder existed underneath, is gone. Instead, you now have a separate page where the icons live. The benefit to this is you can now have unlimited apps in a single folder. The UI lets you just swipe through the pages just like a homescreen.

The folder page is a 3×3 grid instead of the 5×4 grid currently on the homescreen, which means you’ll be doing a little more swiping if you plan to keep a lot of apps in a single folder. Additionally, the folder itself becomes the return point for when you leave an app via the home button. If you open an app from a folder and press home, you’ll be returned to that folder.

If you’re a fan of Safari for iOS, you may have noticed a few extra — and potentially unwanted buttons — promoting Disney, Apple, ESPN, and Yahoo. Don’t worry, they aren’t permanent. These are a visualization of your bookmarked Favorites, and Apple has set up a few to get you started. Unfortunately, adding and removing Favorites isn’t completely obvious. Our quick video walks you through how to add or remove things from your Favorites.

While Apple’s new Touch ID system is available for the iPhone 5S only right now, it’s clear that this is something that will be around for a little while. As a fingerprint sensor for bio-metric authentication, Apple has hit the nail on the head. Not only is using the system nice and simple, but the setup is incredibly simple. You can set yourself up in under a minute, and it has a very high accuracy rate as you us it for unlocking your phone and completing purchases.

There are still many other things going on in iOS 7 that we haven’t covered here. You really could lose a day trying to find all of the new things going on with this OS. Many of the changes are subtle, visual differences on the surface with wildly different functionality underneath. Whether you’re a fan of all of the changes or not, it’s a whole new iOS in front of us today.